Is this what pre-Nazi Germany looked like?

Did anyone else feel sickened reading this in The Guardian yesterday?

Thousands upon thousands of Arizonians (landed emigrants or not) are leaving the state because of Bill SB 107 which allows the government and its agents to stop and arrest citizens on the suspicion of being off-white in colour and possibly undocumented. And if you or I help them, we can also be charged.

Politicians have responded to demands for the border to be strengthened and for more deportations, culminating in SB 1070. The legislation, in effect, turns Arizona's undocumented residents into criminals, handing responsibility for enforcement from immigration officers to the police. Anyone without proper papers who comes into contact with the police – be it for something as minor as a broken brake light – can have their documents checked if police suspect them of being illegal immigrants, and find themselves rapidly deported. Anyone who helps an undocumented person, whether by housing them or offering them work or even feeding them or giving them a lift, can also find themselves in trouble.

Many successful businesses in Phoenix are closing their doors due to this repressive, obscene and regressive legislation. Many parents are leaving because of the fear of future harrassment of their children. Many brilliant students can't attend prestigious universities because of laws against raising scholarship funds to do so.

I am chilled to the bone.
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PS And I'm sure there will be some that think I am extreme in my opinion, but from the reading I've done over the years, this is exactly what Germany was doing in the thirties. I would love to be corrected.

Car Mechanic of the Century - only in Newfoundland?

So I take my car to my fairly new (to me) mechanic first thing in the morning so he can assess the damage to my rim and tire.

The tire is hopeless - the sides are shredded. But he thinks he can hammer out the rim. Come back later in the afternoon.

Which I do. There were no tires in stock at his supplier so he drove to a Canadian Tire and picked one up, a good one. Cost him $64.95 plus tax and he shows me the bill.

And yes, it took a while but he was able to beat out the rim with a rubber hammer and it was as good as new.

So he installs the new tire and refurbished rim and tells me I'd lost the hubcap in the blowout but he would poke around the shed out back there and find me one, don't go out now and buy one, just drop by the next time you're passing and I'll have one for you. Free.

So he goes to his laptop and fiddles around and produces a bill for $80.00.

That's wrong, I say.

Too much? he asks.

Far too little, I say.

Well I charged you $3.00 for the disposal fee for the old tire and the taxes and the cost of the new tire so that comes to $80 in my reckoning.

No, you forgot the labour - you had to beat out the old rim and install the new tire and run around downtown to find a new tire plus your own mileage on top of that....

Ah no! I'm not charging you for any of that. You had enough stress with that blowout!

Now that's not right! I protest loudly.

Oh it is, it is! I can't take advantage of anyone's trouble. That's not my way of doing things, b'y.

A Timpani of Mechanics

Collective nouns. Love them. My favourite of all time being "an exultation of larks". So why not a timpani of mechanics?

The morning's horoscope read, in part:

"Watch out for car trouble".

Silly stuff, who pays attention?

10.p.m at night. Gorgeous golden moon dipping low on the horizon. My friend and I barrelling along in my car at a safe speed. Lots of moose around here at night. A sportscar passes us at a hell of a lick followed by a terrible squeal of brakes and he weaves all over the road and finally straightens out and we see the moose he has just missed taking off into the underbrush. Sports car slows to a stately pace in front of us. We just about hear his heart thumping and can't resist some snide remarks about his double digit IQ status.

Then out of nowhere we hear a bang, like a gunshot and my car starts to weave. I've been here before. And it's a blowout of the exact same tire.

But this time it's completely different. My friend is a retired mechanic who immediately and intuitively KNOWS how to handle everything. Finds the car jack in its special cave under the driver's seat (who knew?)and finds a rock to bang the shredded tire off when it refuses to budge after the ratchets are loosened. There is something about a man knowing all this stuff automatically that never ceases to amaze me. The ingenuity, competence and brute strength rolled into one tight package. At intervals, two trucks stop. Both are mechanics who offer help. My friend doesn't need any.

If I were alone in my car in this deserted strip of roadway with no cell phone coverage what are the odds I'd have been there the following morning still wringing my wrists?

More Entertainment from the Vatican Vanities

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi announces the revised Catholic laws. Photograph: Andrew Medichini/AP

So now we have a further episode of women hatred from this sorry bunch of barnacle encrusted old patriarchs aka Roman Catholic Hierarchy.

They have now classified even an attempted ordination of a woman as equivalent to paedophilia and child rape along with the usual heresy charges (what ever that is - perhaps having the gall to break free of the brain-washing cult?) Yes, lump these women in with the thousands upon thousands of predatory paedophiles who destroyed countless children's lives!

But they are certainly clear on the fact that paedophiles are a cut far, far above females, being as they are still ordained and not ex-communicated.

This comes right on the heels of the announcement from the Church of England that they would be consecrating female bishops to bring C of E into full equality.

Co-incidence?

Perhaps they're hoping to catch the onslaught of exits by the misogynists of C of E?

What a perfectly vile institution it is. How any female can be a supporter of such hatred and contempt is beyond my reasoning capacity.

For your entertainment.

This takes so little time to do that it really doesn't qualify as a timewaster at all.

You clip and paste one of your blogposts into the blank space and it is shaken and not stirred and results in pairing you with a famous author who is closest to your style of writing.

I was only thrilled that I write like Agatha Christie. I spent an entire summer on a beach when I was 12 just reading everything she ever wrote and announcing to anyone and everyone that I was going to be an author just like her when I grew up.

Why do parents die long before you can show them stuff that proves they were wrong?

No receipts please, we're Newfoundlanders.

I found another handyman.

Thing is, out here at the edge of the Atlantic, no handyman ever ever works “above the table”. All is “under.” Apart from the obvious implications on the economy and taxes, there is the non-return of phone calls when things go wrong with the work they've done. “No, I never did work for her, can she prove it?”

In the business I'm in I positively hate this black economy. It is unfair to the rest of us tax paying citizens and apart from anything else it is criminal behaviour.

So I participate. Reluctantly. I have absolutely no choice or my house would fall down around my ears.

I can't even write about it, much as I would like to, apart from here on the blog. I would be run out of Dodge quicker than you could blink. No one writes about it here. You could never get your toilet fixed or your wires uncrossed or your driveway paved. Blackballed you'd be by the Contractors Non-union. You'd have to pack up and leave the province.

So there's a bemused tolerance of it all. Even from the politicians. It is taboo to discuss yer man or yer woman on unemployment insurance (or welfare) making themselves a pack-load of cash money on the side, keeping it well away from banks and spending it under the counter somewhere else. Untraceable. Sort of. There are ways. I should know. Having done some forensic accounting in my time. Not that I ever talk about that particular skill-set here.

So here's this new fellow out back. Fixing the garage door that only worked properly once since it was installed two years ago. Fellow who installed it didn't return my calls or said he'd be here 'next week' or he was 'busy at the fish now'.

I gave this new fellow a long list of poorly performed past handiwork to fix.

And you know how I'll be paying him.

Happy Teens

Teens happiest people in Canada

So said the headline and in hanging out with the grandgirl who will be sixteen this year, I've observed her happiness and the happiness of her friends.

It has astonished me. When I recall my teenage angst, and my daughters' for that matter, she presents a far different picture than ours.

Moodiness is rare. She has a load of friends and they all hang together in a large group. Most evident amongst them all is their marvellous sense of humour, how relaxed they are, how accommodating and inclusive they are of older and younger people, how engaged both politically and environmentally. How talented and versatile they are and how spontaneously they will perform a skit, or dance or hug and comfort each other .

I thought this was all limited to her good fortune, her sunny nature and that of her friends whom I should mention are of both genders and all ethnicities.

Until I read this:

In fact, 96 per cent of Canadians aged 12 to 19 reported they were highly satisfied with life in 2009. That's compared to 94 per cent of teens who reported either being satisfied or very satisfied with their lives in 2008. Each year the Canadian Community Health Survey asks Canadians to rank their life satisfaction, and the data shows that teens are getting more satisfied every year.

And this:

According to the experts, teens are happy because their parents (the baby boomers and gen Xers) are really good at being moms and dads. These parents have put a ton of resources into kids, from school and extracurricular programs, to counsellors and sport and recreation opportunities.

Read more about it here.

This more than anything I've read in the last while gives me hope - the real kind. These kids are all aware of the mess we're leaving them and they're still happy!

Gee, it makes me want to start all over again!
Wait!
Nah!

The Secret Garden

One of my favourite books as a child was "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I was in Fourth Class (Grade 4) when it was read to us on Thursday afternoons by our teacher. I could hardly wait for the next episode, rationed out to us in this way. Subsequently, I took it out of the library numerous times. My parents could never see the point of presenting me with my own personal copy of a library book that had been read so many times.

I bought it for my daughters and again, and I was very lucky this time, I managed to acquire a very old edition for the grandgirl. We all shared the same opinion - we absolutely adored it.

The movies that have been made of it have failed to capture the story very well. The book is quite dark which enhances the slowly brightening beauty of the garden the children create out of emotional need and loneliness.

Of the films, the 1949 version, the second movie adaptation with Margaret O'Brien, which was filmed mostly in black-and-white while the sequences set in the restored garden are in Technicolor, is my favourite. My review of it is here.

I was reminded of all of this when exploring with my dog yesterday I found this wild lost garden and its overwhelming rhododendrons. I took a photo of one and paraphrased Existentialism 101 to myself:

"If a rhododendron blooms in a wild forgotten garden, does anyone see it?"

Waiting

The whales are in, following the capelin which throw themselves by the hundreds of thousands on the shore in the annual frenzy of breeding.

The whales come within about twenty feet of the shoreline and their surprisingly soft tomcat calls can be heard above the sheesh of the waves on the beach stones.

When the fog descends there isn't a hope in hell of catching a glimpse.

But these tourists hauled down their beach chairs and little tables and a picnic and a huge dose of patience to the very edge of the five foot waves.

And waited.

The Real Thing!

No, it's not that toxic sludge of bottled sugared tap water I'm talking.

I just thought to share this photo I took yesterday out in a community called Gaskiers about 30KM from where I live.

Sometimes there is the confluence of three amazing blues in one day - barely a cloud in the sparking blue sky and this rare incredible blue fog rolls in, admiring itself in
the denim blue of the ocean.

The clothesline was such a bonus in this shot. I'm thinking of adding it (with appropriate ditty) to my greeting card line.

Da Nose and Da Clothes

I'm totally amazed at how programmed I can be when it comes to marketing, even though I haven't had a television in over seventeen years.

I was telling someone the other day how my laundry always smells so wonderful, sheets, clothes, towels, and she asked me what detergent I use and I told her. And that was that. I thought.

And today I'm bringing in a clothes line full of tea-towels and towels and napkins and dishcloths and they're all smelling so wonderful that I stick my face into the laundry basket and inhale. And the penny drops, well - duh.

They smell so wonderful because there are blossoming lilacs all around the clothes line and the fresh sea air has been blowing through them all day long.

Just imagine! This kind of scent doesn't come in a bottle!

City Woman strikes again!

By Their Boots Ye Shall Know Them

I promise I'll shut up about the G20 after this, which I wrote about here and here but finally, finally, as I suspected from all I read, the police provocateurs have been 'outed'. They are the much villified "Black Bloc" and used window smashing, fire starting, etc., to intimidate the genuine peaceful protestors.

Toronto is right now in the midst of a massive government / media propaganda fraud. As events unfold, it is becoming increasingly clear that the 'Black Bloc' are undercover police operatives engaged in purposeful provocations to eclipse and invalidate legitimate G20 citizen protest by starting a riot. Government agents have been caught doing this before in Canada

The undercover police were all wearing the same type of new police issue boot!

Read all about it here.

The public outcry is just beginning, there have also been reports of rape threats and inappropriate touching of a child by the police.

As Canada Day dawns I am ashamed of the scandal of the G20 which was funded to the tune of over a billion by us taxpayers. It is a sad, sad world when we cannot protest against the Theocorporatocracy that is trying to drown our voices even here in the supposedly "True North Strong and Free".

However, I am heartened that this police corruption is being exposed by We The People. What good will come of it I don't know. The police has the full force of the government behind them. We only have to look at the powerful lobbies, the true puppeteers, to see who will win this game.

Aging Students

Picture is of my school days.

One of the surest signs of aging I have are my daughters' friends. During my daughters' high school years I also worked at their school. So apart from their school friends coming in and out of our home I got to know them independently in my office at the school.

Now they're all oldish people on Facebook, some are bald even, I'm sure many can be nudging closer to - gasp - grandparenting as their kids hit their twenties.

But all the predictions we had about these kids are so not accurate. The ones we thought would have 6 kids, have none, the ones we thought would be wealthy lawyers are poets, the high school sweetheart marriages we predicted would break up within a year are still solid as a rock and the ones we worried about because of the intolerant world we live in are out and proud.

There's something heartbreakingly poignant about school photos isn't there? I look at the wonder and the hope on all those lovely young faces in my daughters' high school class pictures and think, oh please! come join us here at the other side. Intact. Survivors.

Free for the Taking

You know what matters?

I'll tell you what matters.

Facing away from the breathtaking sunset on my left tonight and looking east, and then north and south, I catch all points of the sky reflecting shyly, in these delicate shades of pink, the wildest colours of crimson, orange, purple in the west. And I stand in awe.

And think to myself: if more people were aware of this staggering beauty, maybe we could all just cop ourselves on a little more and treasure this one wild and precious life and its awesomeness.

I mean, if we only saw this sight once every, say, 25 years, we would be on our knees, right?

Anarchists and Terrorists and Boogey Men, Oh My!

We all want simple explanations of everything, don't we? Nothing too complex to give us a headache, to make us question the media spin which is being served morning, noon and night. I'm sure I'm not alone in that I get tired of it all. Tired of sorting out the chaff from the wheat, the lies from the truth.

Like the Ontario police forcing through last minute legislation for unheard of suspension of basic human rights and granting themselves the use of extraordinary measures in Toronto, spouting off about anarchists and terrorists. Who are they trying to intimidate with these words?

Why, ordinary protestors like me and you. What a deterrent to the subdued masses to see heads being crunched by batons, full body and private vehicle searches, people hauled off to jail, rubber bullets fired into crowds, sound cannons deafening those who dare to speak up for the rights of the downtrodden. Makes one think twice about going out with a placard, right?

Who are these anarchists, one might ask. Well, they're often plain clothes police themselves, stirring up the crowd, breaking windows, whipping up the hysteria, planting rocks and weapons.

A study has been made of this phenomenon by Naomi Archer, an indigenous rights activist.

She has studied the Miami Model* of this kind of warfare against peacefully protesting citizens and has come up with a 40 box checklist, amongst which are:

• Information warfare. This starts weeks before the event. Protesters are criminalized and dehumanized, and described as dangerous “anarchists” and “terrorists” the city needs to defend against.
“Often, a faux cache is found,” says Archer. “They are usually ordinary objects, like bike inner tubes, camping equipment, but the police make them out to look threatening. It lays the groundwork for police to be violent and it means there’s a reduced accountability of law enforcement.”
• Intimidation. Police start random searches of perceived protesters before any large rallies. They are asked where they are staying, why they are walking around. Police raid organizer’s homes or meeting places, “usually just before the summit, so there’s maximum chaos organizers have to deal with,” says Archer.
•“All this is meant to dissuade participants. The best way to make sure you don’t have a critical mass of people taking over the streets like in Seattle is to reduce the numbers at the outset.”
•This is usually made possible by last-minute city regulations, curtailing the right to protest. In Miami, the city commission passed a temporary ordinance forbidding groups of more than seven to congregate for more than 30 minutes without a permit.

Read more here:

And in case there's doubt about any of this:

More than 270 people were arrested in Miami during the summit seven years ago.

How many were convicted, in the end?

“None,” says lawyer Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, who was the president of the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union back then.

None.

It will be most interesting to see how many Toronto protesters will be convicted.

And that's the real story.

*It refers to police tactics used in Miami seven years ago, during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, and, more importantly, the protests erupting on the streets outside.

The G6 Summit.

It is extraordinary what I can see through my office window. In the water today, the seals bob up and grin and disappear under the water again.

Ah, there's lots of fish out there obviously.

Next, nearer the shore, there are the loons. Three of them hang out together all the time. I wonder at this arrangement they have made. Loons are normally in pairs. One must be a widow then, or a widower and the others include her in their soft shoe paddles around the bay. So she's not too lonely.

On the shore, the gulls congregate, grabbing at the leftovers washed in by the tide maintaining a respectful distance from the loons.

On my front lawn the robins gather around the feeder as the ravens (who aren't aware that they're so much bigger) await up in the trees on their leftovers.

On the deck are the blue jays hopping around just for the hell of it.

Pacing up and down at the sides of the house, ever watchful, are the juncoes, like security guards, pecking at the odd worm, seeming to march in step with each other.

And they all have their own sounds and allow each other the time to chirp and crawk.

Us pathetic humans could learn so much from all these accommodations. None of these birds get into conflict. Ever.

Democracy in Action - Canadian Version

I'm sure we're all sleeping better at night knowing that the police for the G8 & G20 Summits currently taking place in Ontario, Canada are doing their job in protecting Demz Wot Rulez Us from us heathens, peons and the Great Unwashed.

You see they've been given special powers.

My favourite bit is this:

'The public has nothing to fear with this legislation and the way the police will use this legislation. It really comes down to a case of common sense and officer discretion.'— Sgt. Tim Burrows of the G8/G20 Integrated Security Unit

No, sorry, it is this:

The regulation also says that if someone has a dispute with an officer and it goes to court "the police officer's statement under oath is considered conclusive evidence under the Act."

Read more

All of this hoopla and police power is costing Canada 1 Billion Dollars.

Remember don't go out there with a peaceful placard of protest, police officers can say you were armed to the teeth and they had to shoot your legs off and they'd be believed.

And oh yeah, if they take a dislike to you they can just burst your ear drums with the sound cannon:


Read more about that here.

PICTURE OF THE WEEK

H/T BARTCOP

Everything's Connected, Right?

I was contemplating yesterday's earthquake here in Canada in Quebec and Ontario and grateful that it wasn't worse.

I remembered the one I felt in 1985. I was working on the 8th floor of an office building in Toronto and it was the weirdest feeling - as if everything was so fragile, as if all could collapse around me, just like that. It was over in a minute probably, but I can still recall the feeling: as if solidity was just an illusion we all carried around.

And recently I had this thought, this curiosity, about the oil and not just the leaks, ALL the oil we're syphoning from the bowels of Mother Earth for the past century, billions and billions of barrels, what then happens to her displaced layers as a result of the removal of all this oil?

I've studied a tiny bit about geology and physics in my time and I marched forth upon the interwebz and found, well, zero, on this topic. Is it gasses or air that fill the vacuum created by the expelled oil? I can see water from the ocean filling the void - but that could be disruptive to the tides, right?

Could this displacement of oil cause the tetonic plates to shift?

Will earthquakes and tsunamis increase?

So apart from the devastation of the used expelled gaseous oil causing cataclysmic climate change, we have the void left by the extracted oil causing upheavals in the earth's crust?

I would love to be more educated on this topic.

UPDATE

My good friend Government Funded Blogger kindly directed me to

this

which confirms my speculation on the topic. My question would be: Why isn't it addressed more by governments?

Irrational Fear

Every time I read about an aircrash lately, I've been nodding to myself. I don't know what's wrong with me.

I've planned to go to Ireland in September/October and something is holding me back from actually booking the trip. My intuition has always been of a pretty high quality. It's an instinct that's non-comparitive I suppose and completely subjective. I'll give you a few examples:

When I saw this house I'm living in now I knew it was mine even though the vendors reneged on the original deal. I went around for months talking about the house and was totally unsurprised when of their own volition, the vendors contacted me again five months later. Same with Cara in the last few days. I saw her picture and knew she was mine. I could go on, you get the drift.

On the last flight I was on less than a month ago I was in total discomfort at every bounce of turbulence, every landing and takeoff (six in total on a kind of milk run across Canada). I had the thought that I would never fly again if I got out of this one alive.

I've been in that territory before and attended some bio-feedback classes to get a handle on it way back in the eighties.

My logical self knows it's more dangerous to drive my car but also kicks in to tell me that in this age of economic freefall cutbacks are possibly happening in the area of airplane maintenance and shaved back pilot wages. And I'm not even thinking about the alcoholic drug addicts in the control towers.

I kick myself for being so irrational but this isn't helping. I'm stuck in Silly Fartdom.

PS Another update on another airline today: passengers trapped and screaming. Great!